Watching political history unfold and sanitized in the Black community   E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Ghanadot September 20, 2014   Just when you think you have heard it all about why Blacks vote Democrat, a new theory turns up: Republican's opposition to the Voter Registration Act of 1965 and matters emanating from it!   Before this, the justification for the Black vote was that Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate for 1964, together with Southern Democrats, had voted against the Civil Rights Bill of that year.    Then, suddenly, the Southern conservative Democrat magically became a Republican in 1965.   If there ever was a revisionist history, this excuse was one.  Thus, a perfect hook was cast by this switch to pull the Southern Conservative into the rank of the conservative Republican party and the racism void that Democrats supposedly vacated, if at all.   But note that there never was "Southern Republican" in the political arrangement of the South, back in the 60s when the South was solidly Democrat.   In the South, the political power of governance, before and after Goldwater, was solidly in the hands of Democrats and it was racist.   Strangely, Blacks, as a group that was suppressed and have been abused in the South since the beginning of American history, have become a powerful constituency for Democrats for the past 50 years plus.    Democrats have since owned the Black political space.  Cry racism, factual or not, and Democrats would be forgiven; winning crucial campaigns on the backs of Blacks and on the strength of this accusation alone.    Malcolm X, as far as I know, was the first to ask his fellow Blacks In 1965, “The fact that you threw 80% of your votes behind the Democrats that put the Democrats in the White House…. but …. what do you get out of it?” The veritable Black political activist, Malcolm X, knew in 1965 that there was no such ideological shift of Southern Democrats to the Republican party.  Otherwise, why would he question the one-sided Black Democrat vote?   Despite Malcolm X warning, the Black vote for Democrats has increased.  Barack Obama, first Black Democrat presidential candidate, pushed it to an epic portion of 95% in 2008, a phenomenal one-sided voting trend.  And the charge of racist Republicans has continued to this day.    Unfortunately, this narrative, in its assumptions and assertions so far, has worked; in spite of its brazen, contradictory nature to the history of Black experience in the South.   Sadly, the one sided "Republican racist" impression left does Black America no good.    In a universe that already has a negative view of the Black race, to think that only Republicans can be racists and that Black loyalty to a party can turn on a dime, on a perception gained inside the space of mere three months of a debate in Congress in 1964, must be an insult to the race.   It is as if to assert that the entire Black America race is a fickle minded constituency that is willing to go blindly in one political direction.   And this can only be so because of how the history of slavery and the South has been told.   But as observed by Malcolm, this blindness is a product of a willing ideological misdirection that has gained Blacks nothing over the decades!   We have Blacks who are willing and committed to never see Democrats described as racists.  And, therefore, are willing to have the history of the white man in the South sanitized.   So now, the Democrat party, the former white power structure and the party of Jim Crow of the South, is no longer seen as attached to its own racist history!  But unfortunate for these political operatives, the timeline of the history that purports to present this ideological shift tells a different story.   In 1964, the bill could not have passed without a majority Republican support vote.  President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, at the signing of the Bill, acknowledged this fact for the successful passing.    Eighteen of Democrats senators and a lone Republican, Strom Thurmond, filibustered the Bill. Democrats on the list are now heroes.  Thurmond, the Republican, is the only one guilty of the racist charge.   Senator Robert C. Byrd (Democrat) led the filibuster. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia (Democrat) closed the argument in opposition to the Bill.   The opposition to the Bill was overwhelmingly Democrat party.  And this should have closed the "shift" excuse.  Or made it hollow, judging by the mostly prominent Democrat names on the list; names whose progenies are notably active in the party’s affairs of today – Albert Gore, Richard Russell, William Fulbright, Robert Byrd and more.  "Committed to the filibuster (1965) effort were the powerful Senators Richard Russell, Thurmond, Robert Byrd, William Fulbright and Sam Ervin," wrote the Constitution Daily.   Senator Richard Russell, the Democrat who closed the argument against the 1965 bill, would have the Senate building named after him in 1972.    And, conveniently, Senator Sam Irvin’s (Democrat), who opposed both the 1964 Act and the 1965 would be forgotten and soon to be minted as the hero in the Watergate saga of the 70s, which overthrew Richard Nixon, a Republican president.   Earlier, Sam Irvin had supported the pro Jim Crow document, the Southern Manifesto in 1956, together with 96 Democrats and four Republicans.  The Southern Manifesto was a reaction to Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, "a landmark U. S. Supreme Court decision, which ruled that "U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional."   You would think these major attempts against Black interest, mostly by Democrats, would be remembered as racists.   But no problem.  Only Republicans can be against Black empowerment.  However, should any Democrats be perceived as racist, as they were in the Jim Crow era, they could all be moved en-masse to the Republican side.     The 1965 Voting Rights Bill was first and jointly proposed in Congress by then Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield (Democrat) and Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (Republican). In the end, the Bill was passed in the Senate by a 79-18 vote (Democrats 49-17), (Republicans 30-1) on August 4, 1965.   The proposal of the Bill might seem bi-partisan.  But remove the heavier percentage of the Republican vote and the Bill would not have passed.    The lone opposing vote on the Republican side was from Strom Thurmond.  He became the prominent racist ahead of all 18 Democrat who had opposed the Bill, while Robert Byrd, also Democrat, went on to become the "lion of the Senate."   Strom never outlived the angst against him.  When Trent Lott (Republican and the Senate majority Leader) eulogized him on his 100th birthday, he was by this reason forced out of office in 2003, mostly from Black outcry. Democrat Richard Russell, a filibuster of the 1965 would 1964 and 65 Bills and part author of the Southern Manifesto was already cleared of any taint of the racism of his time by the time he died in 1973.  And he even got the Russell Senate Office building named after him.    However, the good Civil Rights acts by personalities on the Republican side, from the Civil War to date, would be spun to mean nothing.    The historic fact of 1957 Bill, the first Civil Rights act after Reconstruction, that it was Nixon, together with Martin Luther King Jr. and President Eisenhower, who crafted that bill will become a ghost.     And with it, another linkage to Black heritage will be buried:  that Nixon and Martin had conceived the Bill in Ghana, after they had returned from a trip to Celebrate that country's independence, the first in sub-Sahara Africa.   But "The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was the act that kick-started the civil rights legislative programme that was to include the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act," wrote The History Learning Site.    Nixon's effort, those of Eisenhower and all the good deeds of Republicans since Lincoln, had earned nothing from the majority of Blacks.   The image that is left is that Republicans are racists.  Many legislative efforts from this group are seen as racist.  Photo identification to guard against voting fraud is perceived as an attempt to suppress the Black vote to be fought against in the courts.  It didn't matter even voting fraud might end up hurting law-abiding Black citizens; the reason being Black political animus against Republicans have become fixed.    This one-party political posture is bad.  It has become a trap that has kept Black interests down and endangered, like a frog caught in a slow boiling pot. The only consideration left for it is how long it is willing to wait in the progressively boiling pot to be cooked.    Malcolm X called us “A POLITICAL CHUMP!" in 1965 because we have already put all our faith in the Democrat vote.   E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, September 20, 2014 Permission to publish: Please feel free to publish or reproduce, with credits, unedited. If posted at a website, email a copy of the web page to publisher@ghanadot.com. Or don't publish at all.